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Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

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Eco's "Six Walks in the Fictional Woods" smells like Italo Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millenium". Each essay, or walk, is an extended musing, in an informally scholastic tone of voice, of the author's preferred elements of fiction reading and composition. Most of the comparative material is taken from Nerval's, Joyce's and his own works, and given splashes of splendour with the special touch of brilliance to which we all know Eco has easy access. The essays lack the intensified beauty of his fiction ("Foucault's Pendulum," or "The Name of the Rose"), but demand consideration standing out as interesting thought material from the legendary linguist. --Alejandro Arevalo

Six Walks is more accessible than I had expected (my copy is now heavily highlighted, marked up, and loaded with the little plastic stickies I use to flag ideas and references). Eco is speaking to readers and, thereby, equally to writers. The six Charles Elliot Norton lectures begin with the role time plays in fiction and end with the importance (to our perception of reality) of accuracy in writing fiction. This is weighty stuff made accessible by Eco's illustration by example: Yes, Dante, Shakespeare, and Kafka, but the writers who give us Hercule Poirot, Agent 007 and Little Red Riding Hood as well. If you read fiction or write fiction, the material will be useful and the book will please.

It is entirely possible, that you, who are reading these lines, are far more advanced in the field of narratology and semiotics. If that is the case, you won't find much material here, because I'm guessing that you already know what you're looking for. For others, few words should be said.

Almost thirty years ago, when "Name of the rose" appeared for the first time in world markets, nobody could predict it's success. Complex story that read as a crime fiction, as a mere whodunit', but which held, in it's numerous layers, numerous worlds for competent reader to discover pushed it's author on the top of world's intellectuals. To distant observer, like myself, planetary success didn't seem to trouble Eco at all. He didn't comment on global politics, didn't meddle into affairs of state. All that he did was research and publishing of world of literature, aesthetics, beauty and lot's of other themes that may seem like a waist of time. And indeed, if Eco's impact, influence and success in scientific world should be measured with people who unlocked the human genome, one is tempted to say that his entire life was committed to futile things that interest few people borne and raised in Western tradition. Yet, that kind of reasoning would entirely wrong.

Eco's thoughts on literature, interpretation and signs influenced many reader out there who suddenly found themselves into the forest-world. Where everything was clear before, now lay a jumble of codes that needed to be deciphered and adapted into some kind of functional system. Where plain story existed, now appeared infinite vectors of interpretation, and reader gradually learned that there isn't one, correct way to move trough the forest-world. Eventually, one learned to look upon the world with different set of eyes.

This book here was written in late stages of Eco's thought, and it tends to show this what I'm talking about. It explains the "Name of the rose". Not the way that it should be read. Rather, it explains the idea behind it, it shows how, and why it was put together. And, if you until now understood literature as a mere fiction, something to pass time with, it'll open your eyes. Now, there are hundreds of books, in every language, on literary theory and much of them are dry pieces of work written for advanced reader who dedicated much of his life to this kind of research. This book isn't like that. On every page, you can almost feel Eco's enthusiasm with literature, his joy of reading. Maybe most important thing is that he doesn't put himself on an elevated position, preaching to the masses from it. He, like Socrates, takes his reader into a dialogue, with a single goal in mind - to discover undiscovered possibilities of fiction, to better understand the way every text (not just a literary one) is constructed, hoping in the end, to broad both minds that are set upon this trip. It seems to me that that is the way to write about literature, and I can but say that reading of this book was a great experience even though I was familiar with much of it from other sources. In any way, this is one of the better books on the subject, and it would be mistake to simply pass by it. As someone else said: "Stay awhile, and listen..."

This is one of two texts (the other is Aristotle's Poetics) that largely define how I read. Six Walks is a compilation of six lectures that Eco delivered about how to read, including a description of the contract between reader and author.

While this obviously is a profound series of essays, it is extraordinarily accessible, even when Eco is diving into concepts such as the various types of time, the authorial voice within a story, and the relationship between the reader and the text. Granted this might sound dry, it's not, because Ecco goes to great lengths to illustrate his various points by applying them to specific texts and examples.

Other reviewers here cite examples of top drawer literature, but what struck me is how effectively Eco uses works such as Ian Flemming's James Bond series to illustrate his points. Make no mistake about it, while Eco has a fine literate mind as illustrated by his better books, this is a guy who read comic books growing up and still understands their value to literature, to readers, and to a meaningful reading life.

Very quickly, Eco stresses the importance of rereading a text. The reader hasn't done it justice without revisiting it, and that includes the daring-do sagas of James Bond and other popular literature.

In the eye of this reader, the most profound sections address the authorial voice in each text. One of the greatest dangers of reading that Eco acknowledges is the reader projecting onto the text his own thoughts, values, experiences, instead of seeking out the authorial voice of the text and listening to it carefully. After all, the primary objective of reading is to expand one's experience of the world, and if a reader is only confirming what he already knows and believes to be true, then he's just circling a well trodden path in his own back yard.

Equally important, I think, are the passages that deal with the importance of the various times in reading (story, discourse, and reading times). "We must prepare ourselves to enter a world in which the normal measurement of time counts for next to nothing, a world in which clocks have broken down or been liquified, as in a Dali painting." In addition to letting authors slow time, speed time, and provide a context that lends meaning to various actions, the reader should allow time in various texts to get lost, forgetting whatever they knew beforehand and "lose (one's self) in the labyrinth of time."

Time of course also involves memory, since that is where we store time past that allows us to put the present and future in a meaningful context. "We think things and events thanks to the adhesive function of memory, both personal and collective (history and myth)...This tangle of individual and collective memory prolongs our life, by extending it back through time, and appears to us as a promise of immortality. When we partake of this collective memory (through the tales of our elders or through books), we are like Borges gazing at the magical Aleph - the pointthat contains the entire universe."

Eco defines two types of readers. The primary motivation of the first is to find out how the story ends: Does Ahab land the whale? The second type of reader is willing to suspend his sense of disbelief to the point where he regards the authorial voice in the text as a guide and is willing to strive to be the type of reader that guide wishes.

Initially, I rejected the degree of surrender that Eco cites for the more serious reader, but the more I think about it, the less implausible it seems.

Read on brave reader. See you on the other side of the woods.